Concussion: Mad as Hell, But Without Much to Fear

A generic hero weighs down the brutal exposure of the most important sports story of the last decade.

December 23, 2015

Concussion
isn’t angry enough for a
polemic, and it isn’t interesting enough to be an uplifting Hollywood message
movie, which means it’s just competent enough to fail on two separate, parallel
fronts. There’s nothing offensive about Concussion,
and if you know absolutely nothing about Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE)
or the NFL’s grotesque history of ignoring,
then disputing the disease, you might find certain sections of the film
informative, even revelatory. But the odds are you won’t even make it to that
point, because while the facts of Concussion
are powerful, the rest of the film is safe, rote and uninspired. Just when
it begins to stoke our outrage, it cuts away to a paint-by-numbers story of One
Man Fighting Against The System, and our eyelids start getting heavy. This is a
Hollywood story that is absolutely not a
Hollywood story.

We meet Dr. Bennet Omalu (a
noble, earnest, and dull Will Smith), a Nigerian neurologist training to be a forensic pathologist in
Pittsburgh, when the body of Hall of Fame Pittsburgh Steelers center Mike
Webster, comes across his slab. Webster committed suicide after a long fall
from grace and, Omalu—established here as someone who literally talks to his
dead patients before he autopsies them—can’t figure out why such a healthy man
would have “gone so mad.” Omalu cuts Webster open and discovers his brain has
CTE, a disease so new and baffling that he actually gets to name it. Omalu then
examines the brains of more dead football players, finds the disease again, and
determines it is caused specifically by the collisions that come from playing
football. When he attempts to present his findings, he learns that powers are
aligned against him, that football, and the NFL, is too overwhelming a force to
go down without a fight. He ends up teaming with his boss (Albert Brooks) and a
former Steelers team doctor (Alec Baldwin) to try to inform people of the
disease, and battle the NFL’s attempts to silence them.

I’m sure this sounds very
exciting, and there are times when the movie gets cranking and builds up an
admirable head of steam. It is shocking
how ignored this massive medical breakthrough was by the League that could have
made a difference; it’s rare to see such a blatant, obvious dereliction of duty
in the public square, a sports league refusing to admit its game was dangerous,
let alone try to make it safer. The film’s strongest moments are when it
indicts us all, not just the League, in this moral compromise; our love for the
game of football willfully blinding us to its inherent destructiveness. There’s
a scene where Omalu watches ESPN’s infamous “Jacked Up!” segments, in which
ESPN broadcasters openly cheered brain injuries, even going so far as to paint
a target on the helmet of opposing players, and it’s among the most grotesque
and powerful scenes in the film. (As our own Jamil Smith wrote in the most
recent issue of the New Republic,
football is a part of our American character, for good and, increasingly, for
bad.)

The
problem is that the movie edges right up to the corner on this stuff and then
scampers back to Omalu’s personal narrative, which is decidedly less
compelling. There’s a kernel of a story in Omalu’s love for America and his devout
belief in its essential dedication to justice—he’s constantly dumbfounded that
people won’t listen to him—but the movie scampers off again, clinging to its
Traditional Movie Hero structure like an amulet. Thus, an inordinate amount of
time is spent on Omalu’s romance, such as it is, with a fellow Nigerian woman
who comes to America and lives in his home. We are also kept up to date on whether
Omalu gets along with his co-workers, and whether he will overcome his personal
fears and step up at the big climactic moment. It’s bizarre to see a movie that
is ostensibly about the perils of sports hew so closely to a traditional sports
narrative, there’s even a montage or two. The film is about a daring man, but
it is anything but daring.

It’s bizarre to see a movie that is ostensibly about the perils of sports hew so closely to a traditional sports narrative.

One
wonders what, say, a mid-90s, loaded-and-ready-for-bear Oliver Stone would have
done with a movie like this, or even a modern-day Steven Soderbergh. Director
Peter Landesman is a former journalist and a bit of a muckraker, but he spends
so much time telling a conventional narrative that you can’t help but wonder if
the news of Sony Pictures, the distributor, being hesitant about the film didn’t
get in his head a little. The film doesn’t pull many punches toward the NFL. Some
scenes may
have been cut, and it still keeps reeling back into a comfortable, bland
structure. (Commissioner Roger Goodell is still played by Luke Wilson as the
empty-headed corporate shill he is.) There’s a scene toward the end when
Omalu’s wife is being followed by… someone,
and the film’s attempts to conjure up a paranoid, The World Is Against Him vibe
feel forced, almost laughable. That’s a scene that needs to sing in a movie like this, but the movie
is never unhinged enough to feel particularly dangerous. The movie wants us to
know the bad guys, but it never makes us that scared of them. You see the Silkwood headlights in the rearview
mirror, but you don’t believe them.

There have been many
comparisons between Concussion and The Insider, the lonely whistleblower
out to save lives against the faceless power of a billion-dollar corporation.
But that movie, as directed by Michael Mann, about Big Tobacco executives, gave
you a nervy sense that if these people were okay with having millions of people
die because they use their product, they were capable of anything. There was
fear in the air. In Concussion, the
bad guys are too fuzzy to get much of a handle on: They’re more ass-covering
middle management than legitimate purveyors of malice. That may be somewhat
true to life—it’s certainly true to Goodell’s life—but it makes an awfully limp
villain. You need a filmmaker like Mann, or Stone, or Soderbergh, to engross us
in the insanity of this world, not just tell a familiar story in the middle of
it. Even though the film makes a strong case against the NFL, and against
football as a sport, as a movie it still feels like a series of compromises, a
downer of a story that keeps trying to convince us it is inspirational. The
discovery of CTE and the NFL’s attempts to tamp down its importance is a
massive story, perhaps the sports
story of the last decade. But Concussion turns
it into a just another obstacle for a generic good guy to overcome. There is
something to be said for Concussion’s
attempts to Trojan Horse its activism through a traditional Hollywood story—but
we have to care about the horse.